The Real Issue of Romney’s Returns
“We don’t pay taxes,” sniffed Queen of Mean Leona Helmsley two decades ago before she went to jail for tax evasion. “Only the little people pay taxes.”
The Romney refusal to release returns has become an issue beyond their actual content, evoking an attitude that did not work out well for a real estate mogul who ran the Palace Hotel, let alone someone trying to take over the White House.
A whiff of noblesse oblige is in the air, a sense that the very rich play by different rules than the rest of us, never a vote-getter in national elections (see John Kerry wind-surfing on his wife’s fortune in 2004).
We are tantalized by Romney’s release of a 2010 return showing he paid 13.9 percent on $21.7 million in income but put off by the annoyance he and his wife express over questions about their estimated quarter of a billion dollar fortune.
“The more we get attacked, the more we get questioned, the more we get pushed,” Ann Romney tells an interviewer this week. “Mitt is honest. His integrity is just golden.”
Such umbrage is not attractive in the couple known for a car garage in one of their many homes and breeding show horses to compete in the Olympics with a running mate who looks like a miniature version of themselves. Do they find it unthinkable that honesty is not the point but a lifestyle that keeps a potential President from understanding the plight of less privileged people?
The very rich are different, F. Scott Fitzgerald told Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s.
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Mr. Stein, your links in the original post don’t show up in this one like they used to do. Don’t know if this is a product of the new edition of TMV.
Anyway, I didn’t know the 2010 tax return showed he paid 13.9% – I thought it was still being revised, incomplete, something. If that is true, then Sen. Reid should offer an apology, resign from his leadership position, and expect the Senate to vote on whether to censure him or not. We are not yet a banana republic, but will be if we do not hold our elected representatives to certain standards.
Ohio, your umbrage at Reid is quaint. Both sides lie (whoops, employ convoluted facts). Reid is just a victim of bad information just as those accusing Obama of being everything from an alien to a socialist. An apology will do, perhaps at the Dems national convention, if Reid and Pelosi go.
Standards, we don’t need no stinkin standards.
dd
And both sides should be held to higher standards. If information isn’t verified, it shouldn’t enter the political bloodstream. We have enough cancer cells now to kill the poor thing. An apology is not enough for the maliciousness of that charge. Still not disproved, though, so maybe Harry is safe.
Make that a “car elevator,” Robert. Otherwise, Amen.
The Ohioan…”And both sides should be heald to higher standards”.
IMO higher standards do not exist in political campaigns. It is the only place I know of you can call the opponent almost anything or say anything and not be held liable.
As for the tax comment by reid, he can claim “reliable sources” fed him this information and that will be fine with most voters. As for the tax issue with Romney, he is like the kid that in the candy from the store with his hands in his pocket.
“What’s in your pocket son”?
“Nothing sir”
“Take your hands out and show me”
“No”
Did the kid take candy or not?
Does Romney have something to hide in his taxes?
Until both Romney and the kid let people see, they both are hiding something.